Are SOA and Enterprise Architecture Now the Same Thing?

ebizQ editor, Peter Schooff, started an excellent discussion today on the ebizQ SOA forum today asking the question as to whether SOA and EA have converged into the "same thing". The question was inspired from David Linthicum's blog, Do SOA and enterprise architecture now mean the same thing?' Yes, they do.

So, where do I stand in this heated debate?

I cannot answer the question definitively. However, my hypothesis is that if they are the same thing then you should be able to map ANY accepted EA Framework such as TOGAF with the elements of SOA.

So for example, continuing with TOGAF, which defines EA as the aggregation of four different architectures, namely:

1. A Business Architecture that defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes.
2. A Data Architecture that describes the structure of an organization's logical and physical data assets and data management resources. Data architecture does not include the design of the actual physical data stores (or database).
3. An Applications Architecture that provides the blueprint for the individual application systems to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization. The application architecture in TOGAF is not concerned with the actual software applications but rather limits the term application to a logical grouping of functionality.
4. A Technology Architecture that describes the logical software and hardware capabilities that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services. This includes IT infrastructure, middleware, networks, communications, processing, standards, etc.

So, does SOA map to each of these four architecture subsets of TOGAF? The bottom line is: Making an assertion is one thing; proving your assertion with a fact-based mapping is the proverbial "the proof is in the pudding."

* Originally posted in the ebizQ SOA forum on September 30, 2010.